Under its starry arch where we cross the vaulted abyss, its own insistent mix of darkness and light, velvety curtain, a difficult work, darker possibility, moment interminable demanding a stricter faith.
Wall of black, dead bliss, profound allness, an endlessness teeming with stars, the darker metaphor, a gauntlet, bowl of fire, dark brilliant secret, what comes before dawn, but never the vivid world of day.
With its turned back, stars turn on their pivot, all honeycombed and sparkle— an inky iridescence where the earth has fallen away.
Brimming, peeking over the rim, infinite roar of an infinite sea, a gleaning of luminous things, lit trellis, a vast mind pouring over my head like water, light and darkness flowing irresistibly toward the other.
Moonlessness, fields of cold, clear light, orchard of stars, all-encompassing wheel, all that’s lost, journey’s end, the dark invisible, the nothing that is— looking up, night is a long way down.
Flash
Thunder claps extending out into an expanse, between where I look and the mountains’ distant flash, where jagged streaks ignite a vast exposure— this x-ray of a town flooded in a riot of light.
In the earth’s dark shudder there’s a passing through of uncertainty and surprise, picked up and set down, as if this place was already what I left behind, somewhere else, a disappearing vibration, lost inside the sound of its own dark crash— the night’s arc all grimace, no sound, the sky ripping, ricochet.
Cracked
A cracked sky swallowed by cracked light, the invisible as it splits, an upheaval and buckling, vibration broadcasting forward, earth and sky filling with the sound of their own dislocation— all shudder, reverberation, a discrete space disturbed, erupting into its own contradiction, a peel of terror slammed against dark air, cleaving, the world moving off its spot— what I call out to there inside the breach, rumble and flash, inside the throat of that hollowed black echo.
BIO
Brent Short lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. His poetry chapbook, The Properties of Light was published in 2015 by Green Rabbit Press. His poetry has appeared in Eads Bridge Literary Review, Sandhill Review, Tar River Poetry, Saint Katherine Review, The Windhover, Amethyst Review, San Pedro River Review and The Orchards Poetry Journal.